- A Boeing whistleblower said he refused to fly on a plane he'd boarded after realizing it was a 737 Max.
- Ed Pierson told CNN he'd deliberately made sure the plane wasn't a 737 Max before booking.
A Boeing whistleblower said he was meant to take a domestic flight last year but ended up leaving the plane before takeoff because he refused to travel on a Boeing 737 Max.
Ed Pierson, a former senior manager at Boeing, told CNN he was set to fly from Seattle to New Jersey with Alaska Airlines. He said he made sure to select a flight that didn't use a Boeing 737 Max.
Pierson's flight was in 2023 — before the January Alaska Airlines door-plug blowout.
"I walked onto the plane — I thought, it's kind of new," Pierson said. "Then I sat down, and on the emergency card it said it was a Max."
He quickly got off the plane just as a flight attendant was closing the front door, he said.
Pierson told CNN that he managed to book an Alaska red-eye flight leaving that evening that wasn't on a Max. He said he had to spend the day at the airport but it was worth it.
Alaska Airlines didn't immediately respond to a request for comment about the apparent last-minute change of aircraft. Boeing didn't immediately respond to a request for comment regarding Pierson's account.
Pierson previously told the Los Angeles Times that he would "absolutely not" fly on a 737 Max because of safety concerns.
Pierson worked at Boeing between 2008 and 2018. He has said that during his time working at Boeing's 737 factory in Renton, Washington, he witnessed overworked employees, parts shortages, and quality issues, which he said made the planes produced by the factory unsafe. He said he recommended to the company's leadership that it close down production at the factory but it ignored his requests.
He testified to Congress in 2019 about production in the factory after two Max 8 crashes in October 2018 and March 2019 killed nearly 350 people — all the passengers and crew on board.
Safety concerns about Boeing jets have resurfaced after an Alaska Airlines Max 9 lost a door plug in midair in January, prompting the Federal Aviation Administration to temporarily ground models of the plane with the same door plug and to make Boeing stop expanding its production of the 737 Max.